


night herons

by notsevensamu



Series: Night Herons and Baklava [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Character Study, Enemies to Lovers, M/M, Pre-Canon, almost, i was just hyped about trying to write in this setting and time period, its not too moody and sad tho, mayhaps i am utter shit at pacing, so i was compelled to write about how Nicolò would recover from the things he had been a part of, the first crusade was horrific, there's probably divergence from the comics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:55:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26013739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notsevensamu/pseuds/notsevensamu
Summary: 1117.A quick but deadly mission. Nicolò's mindset relatively early on in his immortal life.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: Night Herons and Baklava [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1888114
Comments: 4
Kudos: 91





	night herons

**Author's Note:**

> note: al-Aqsa Mosque was referred to by Christian armies as the Temple of Solomon during Jerusalem's siege in 1099.
> 
> please don't hesitate to add a comment if I referred to something improperly. enjoy!

Nicolò was still in the midst of forgiving himself. 

He had been convinced by the voice of another that it was possible. After some years, Nicolò eventually began to believe what he had been told, though he still held many doubts. It was a slow and tortuous endeavor, and no matter the things he did the weight of his past sat like a stone within his core, pinning beneath it memories that would never slip free. 

These memories didn’t simply haunt his dreams. Rather, they suffused his daily life and thoughts. Reminders were present in the wars that still raged across continents and in the actions of European princes who still—even decades later—played politics on foreign soil. Reminders were there in the gazes of men and women in the towns they visited, in the face of the innkeeper who cautiously welcomed them in and the hurried glance of a mother towards her daughter who happened to be playing in the street when he passed. Nicolò didn’t blame them; there was a time when he wouldn’t have noticed these things for what they were, wouldn’t have looked these people in the eyes long enough to consider their fears, their lives. 

Never again would he fail to do so. 

Because once, long ago, he had stood on the portico of the Temple of Solomon and watched blood rise up so high it had sloshed through his boots. At the time he had wondered at the rivers flowing around him, wondered if they truly originated from the blades the pilgrims thrust into bodies on the streets, or if instead he might be the sole source. Him, with his hand on the hilt of a sword that emptied the belly of a man onto his shins, his toes. 

He remembered the face of the man—the first face that he could remember looking at of the people whom he thought he had been destined to slaughter, as it slid in and out of focus. This was once his own death had come to him, rending him apart at his side abruptly and terribly. At the end of his life his body had called out to him loudly, and he could think of nothing else—the soles of his feet worn and strayed too far from Genova, his heart skidding and racing above the catastrophe that existed in the flesh of his torso.

But still there was his face. Nicolò couldn’t say what galvanized him to meet the gaze of his killer and hold it beyond the fact that, so faced with the cold loneliness of death, he had only this man to witness it. His eyelids had been drooping, like Nicolò’s, and his cheeks and forehead were probably just as blotted with gore and sweat. He had dark hair, a dark beard, eyebrows that plunged concerningly towards his nose, as if he were confused. Or perhaps enraged. The stillness to the man’s face seemed to bely some violent movement happening beyond his eyes.

They both at some point ended up crumpled on the stone, their own lives joining the streams that would feed the grasses and shrubs of that holy city. And in turn eventually through the conduit of the soil its inhabitants—its Christians, its Jews, its Muslims; its murderers, its governors, artists, bakers, and merchants. This, Nicolò had thought, they would do, for better or for worse.

But that had not been the end. 

He had risen again amidst a massacre and a sunrise, the vestiges of his dreams manifesting before him. An afterimage of his own face—eyes wide and clear and scared and skin burned red from the sun—hovering in his mind. 

He remembered the clamor and the chaos, the screams that on the third day of Jerusalem’s siege came as if from the sky. He went to the roof of the temple, saw the people cowering from soldiers against a backdrop of smoky plumes which curled upwards from many locations throughout the city. They were scared beyond reason and pressed against the edge of the building—against their burning homes and their impending deaths.

The man who had killed him then killed him once more. It wasn’t difficult, for Nicolò had been lost. Lost beneath a thousand unformed questions and without a grip on the world. He stood as it happened and observed the way a specter might as metal punched through bone, the cage of his chest. Absurdly, he had felt the urge to laugh— Nicolò had heard stories, born witness to many things. Pull the hood off the divine and most often it was desecration, theft, conspiracy, or ambition. Sometimes all four, and more. Nicolò had thought he’d left much of his faith in Antioch, buried in the mud and bones beside the Orontes. And, yet.

He was killed again the next time as well, when he made the mistake of surfacing with a cough. He felt pain erupt along his abdomen, didn’t even have time to find the man’s face before he died again.

The fourth time he awoke Nicolò gave nothing away and so briefly gained the upper hand. His adversary was knocked to the earth, his head colliding sharply with the stone beneath him. But then Nicolò had needed to scrabble for his sword, and when he pulled it into his own chest and down through another’s, the man had unsheathed a knife and opened Nicolò’s throat from below. 

So it went on. On and on until his faith had been torn from under him once more like a rug—when old questions never found answers and older beliefs began to drown him with the weight of the damage they’d caused too many lives. When an enemy was named, and a person emerged from the depths of the unfamiliar syllables. 

The first time Yusuf stepped in front of Christian swords to protect someone who needed protecting, he felt something shake loose inside him. Like the first leaf that quiesces and falls, making an opportunity for others to follow. Nicolò had watched as Yusuf exposed him for the person that he was, and if Yusuf had not stayed with him then, in that first internal winter of guilt and sorrow, Nicolò knew that somehow he would not have survived. 

He had stayed, though. When Yusuf finally reached out to touch Nicolò without a weapon in hand, his fingers had gripped Nicolò’s to pull him up and out of a long and horrifying nightmare. 

Thus there came a day when another version of his faith began to rebuild itself amidst the villages and cities that rose out of grasses and hills crisped to yellow by the Mediterranean air. A day when he understood the land’s people better, and when he learned more about being human than he ever had in the chapels off the Ligurian Sea.

*  
*  
*

_1117_

It was evening. 

The two of them were walking along the shore, idly watching the night herons as they speared fish from the golden surf, a city plunging into the sea around them. Its walls were hazy in the distance, monoliths of height beyond and before them. 

The streets that abutted the water were unoccupied—noticeably devoid of life and economy in the middle of the growing season. During their stroll, they came upon only one man, stooped and combing the sands for anything the sea had decided it could spare. He had a bulging sack draped around his shoulders, and his clothes were faded and damp from the sun and the waves. 

The unsettling emptiness and quiet of the town was not the norm, but rather the result of recent events. Events that had caused needless suffering and which would likely continue to inflict pain on its residents if left alone. Fortunately, Nicolò wasn’t inclined to let it be. 

He and Yusuf had ostensibly come for the markets, rumored to be flourishing this time of year. Yusuf had been hearing things about them for years and was intrigued, but at the same time Nicolò had been harvesting rumors of his own, of some Christian despot ousted from his prior conquests and who had his sights on the city. Nicolò couldn’t pretend it was only coincidence that they had ended up back in the region at a time when a mob was incited to kill several prominent leaders in the government. Now, citizens were being picked off, slaughtered regardless of status or creed. The situation reeked of a grab for power veiled by the thin shroud of an assertion of ideological primacy. 

“We will just have to come back another time for figs and dates, hm?” Yusuf’s smile had been tinged with something rare, something weary and sad, when he’d seen the mostly abandoned shops and squares—its citizens protecting what could be taken away from them by soldiers and hoarders—and when Nicolò could no longer hide his intentions from him.

“No. I will kill the man who has caused this, and then you can have your figs,” Nicolò didn’t miss the furrow that appeared in Yusuf’s brow at his tone, perhaps as he considered their decision to come to this place. He had been silent as they walked through the streets, letting Nicolò’s words sit between them as they meandered towards the sea, guided by the slanting of sunlight on the buildings. 

Meanwhile, Nicolò convinced himself of his own decision to lead them into this dangerous place. After more than twenty years, they were beginning to acknowledge the reality that their bodies were not aging, and it was impossible to deny the ways they healed: wounds stitching together unfailingly, bones un-splintering in moments, and lungs casting off the grip of pandemics that could and did fell thousands. 

But even lacking mortality, in battle there were always other risks. Nicolò would never force Yusuf to join in a mission he did not want to be a part of, especially one he already knew Yusuf would consider a particularly perilous—and, for Nicolò, personal—one. It was why he had withheld from him. Nicolò had at some point begun telling himself he wasn’t interested in atonement for the sake of himself, but he would do all that he could to fix the things that were endlessly being broken. This included ending the lives of self-appointed kings who claimed the right to murder children and their families.

Several terns stepped silently out of their path as they treaded onto the shore, the birds’ feathers ruffling in the breeze. For a while, they just walked. Walked, and listened to the foaming of the waves and shifting of sand beneath their boots. 

“Nicolò.” Yusuf began eventually, and then paused. Perhaps it wasn’t an invitation, but Nicolò took it as one.

“You are welcome to join me, of course.” Nicolò thought of the plans he had been making over the past several weeks. “Though I expect that even then, if we are captured, we would be quite outnumbered.”

Yusuf looked to him, and Nicolò turned his head in response. Searching Yusuf’s face for the answers to any question he posed, out loud or otherwise, had become habit. Reading what was written in the creases on his forehead and in the movement of his eyes was essential to his comprehension of him. It was derived from their early days together, when they had to communicate in fragments and gestures because they lacked any other common language. Nicolò knew that Yusuf was thus attuned to him in a similar way. They spoke better through expression and action. These had always been more vital to their conversations than anything stated. 

So Nicolò saw when Yusuf resigned himself to helping him. A sigh followed.  
Yusuf claimed Nicolò too often tended to become involved in battles he was sure to lose (or, to lose at least once). He knew Yusuf worried that he did so as some form of self-flagellation. Nicolò argued that he only acted because he recognized that he would survive. That, at least, was an answer he could give that held truth. 

“We will celebrate this man’s downfall with _ma’amoul_ , then,” Yusuf said after a couple moments had passed between them, and Nicolo’s mouth twitched the smallest amount. His voice still held some sadness, and there seemed to be many words he was not saying, but he too managed a small, open smile. 

*  
*  
*

The next morning, with Yusuf beside him, Nicolò carved his way into the heart of a towering citadel. 

Though Yusuf was not raised a warrior, there was an undeniable strength and skill evident in the way he wielded his scimitar and cut down his enemies. Nicolò had begun life cast beneath the vault of a church, similarly displaced from the battlefield. Yet Yusuf’s family had taught their son, a born artist, how to defend himself and the ones he loved. It was inevitable that he’d apply the same theory to fighting as he did to drawing, every stroke at once deliberate and captivating. 

Nicolò hoped against reason, as he watched their opponents drop one after another, that perhaps the remnants of the army this king had dragged across the desert were more meagre than even he had anticipated. He wanted to believe they would make it to the place the man had taken up residence and dispatch him before his guards had begun to suspect anything was amiss. 

They were skirting the edges of a courtyard where several gnarled cedars stretched away from the perimeter of columns and up towards the sky, their roots clawing at dusty, depleted soil, when something hit Nicolò. 

He registered the impact before he registered the pain. The force of the bolt breaking through muscle sent him backwards a pace or two, and when he looked towards his shoulder, he waited for his nerves to catch up to what his eyes already anticipated. Blood began blooming where the material of his armor met a bulky, imbedded shaft before he was able to react. 

Yusuf also didn’t have the chance to move to his defense. As Nicolò automatically went to his raise his sword, he was hit again. He could not have said where, because he lost consciousness too quickly, fire and pressure suddenly consuming him from the inside. His thoughts evaporated. The feeling of his legs beneath him vanished. One thing he had found, over the years, was that more often than not death happened at a pace that seemed much too fast for an event that generally marked the culmination of a life. Rarely was there time for reflection, or even comprehension. This was how this death happened, like someone had thrown water over flames instead of letting them dwindle to embers.

The last thing he felt was the press of his chest to something solid, warm. Yusuf caught him before he died, somehow he knew. But then all other sensations left him, and he was alone.

A minute. Five minutes. It always differed, for reasons mostly unknown to them. Sometimes there was much healing to do and sometimes there was very little. Nevertheless, the extent of injury and the timing of their returns didn’t seem to correlate. Occasionally one or both of them would wake in distress, but it was equally likely that they would wake fully whole again.

When Nicolo woke, there was no pain. 

He inhaled, exhaled. Assessed himself as he usually did. His lungs ached only slightly, as they contended with the particles of sand and dirt that he pulled in with each breath. He opened his eyes, saw a crooked backbone in front of him, pale and ridged and bent like an old man’s, and followed it with his gaze to a trunk and then the lowest of the hanging branches. 

He used the tree’s root to pull himself into a sitting position. But he didn’t stay there long.

It didn’t take much time for the empty space of the courtyard to get his heart pounding, that impossible feeling in his chest already aligned with the alarm that was building within him. 

He was moving again in the next instant, scooping his sword from the ground and orienting himself and then, left with few options, heading in the direction he and Yusuf had been heading before the ambush. He was listening now, too, in addition to raising his eyes to where the citadel’s walls met the gradient of the morning sky. He saw no one, nor any crossbow lathes leveled at him. He realized belatedly that the bolts that struck him were no longer lodged in his flesh, for which he was thankful.

He was also grateful for the shadows that enveloped him in the hallways away from the courtyard. Cool and dim, they gave him a semblance of protection. Moreover, he acknowledged the fact that if the guards had gone searching for his and Yusuf’s accomplices and found none, then they were most likely operating under the assumption that there was only one threat remaining to them. This would lend Nicolò a momentary advantage if he encountered anyone before he found Yusuf.

When he turned a corner to find a hallway decked with bodies, he pulled up short. 

Several things came into focus then, as he took in the scene before him—a scene of splayed individuals similar to the one the two of them had created upon their entry into this place, albeit there were more fatalities and more men in the next ten meters than had been present at all of the gates and entryways they’d had to pass through to get to the courtyard. He moved carefully through them, noting their smooth, sunken jaws and cobbled attire, indicators not of power and order but of desperation and strife. He also saw plainly how they had died, their wounds deep, sharp, and efficient. This information was the most helpful to him, if only partially reassuring. He didn’t know these men—couldn’t know them—but it was likely their motivations for fighting were written at least in part on the hollows of their cheeks. Whether or not it was right that this was how and where they fell, the rest he could only guess at. These were, at the very least, the fates that _had_ befallen them. And so Nicolò continued on, seeking the one who had granted them.

Soon, he began to pick up noise. Sounds that were muffled, yet that became his only guides. There were no more bodies past the one group, and no more apparent signs of struggle. He followed where his ears directed him, down one corridor, down the next. And then the distinct shrieking of metal meeting metal met his ears, ceasing just as he appeared outside a dark, heavy door set into an expanse of limestone. 

He must have pushed through into the hall just as Yusuf was disarmed. Otherwise, he doubted he would have found him alive. Or unbound. 

He found Yusuf behind the doorway, in a large hall on a dais strewn with carnage and with a blade pressed against his throat. 

Their eyes met immediately across the distance that separated them, and therefore the  
room resolved itself only in his periphery, long and narrow with successive arches stretching from one end to the other over their heads. Light poured in from somewhere near the head of the room, as if part of it was open for the purpose of its inhabitants and guests getting the chance to enjoy the pleasant coastal air. 

Nothing about the current situation was pleasant for Nicolò. The other men in the room saw nothing of the exchange that passed silently between them, likely hardly considered Nicolò’s appearance in relation to the man they had before them. There were at least ten of them, all converged on Yusuf and the death that surrounded him. What they saw could be inferred, for Nicolò had once lived among similar men: the destruction of their livelihoods that had just occurred before their eyes, the elimination with their king of a sense of safety in a land they deemed hostile and barbaric. 

And what could they do now, but kill the perpetrator? Kill the single man who—unbeknownst to them—was driven not by his own goals but by the goals of a companion who selfishly used his immortality as an excuse to kill himself, to kill the man he had once been and the damage he had once caused. 

Nicolò watched the blade as it moved across Yusuf’s throat.

Then he moved his eyes away and killed all the men in the hall.

*  
*  
*

Nicolò felt it right that, as he had died with Yusuf holding him, Yusuf should come back to the feeling of Nicolò’s hands wrapped around him. 

Yusuf’s own hands came to cup Nicolò’s elbows when he returned, his touch gentle and unfairly reassuring to Nicolò, who felt the reverberations of his apologies deep in his chest. They stayed that way for a time, recovering in ways other than the physical. Nicolò pressed his cheek against Yusuf’s, felt the moisture there and tucked himself even closer. Yusuf responded by squeezing him back. It had taken a single moment, long ago, for Nicolò to recognize himself as the ordained bearer of Yusuf’s fate. Why Yusuf had been chosen as his, he thought he may be pondering for centuries. But he did know that as long as Yusuf chose to keep him close, he would never pull away. 

*

In the weeks that followed, Yusuf and Nicolò remained in the city. They ensured life could resume for its people, while also simply being reluctant to move on so soon. Trading at the markets began again, gradually, and then other businesses re-joined the current of activity. The two of them found reliable lodging for the time being where they could retreat in the evenings but still spend their days finding ways to be helpful to neighbors and residents who had had things taken from them in the tumult that rocked their homes. 

They kept a closer eye on another, as well. Despite everything, it was never their explicit intention to make use of their abilities when they conducted a mission; dying and returning required care to be taken afterwards, as they processed and moved on. 

So if they spent more time than usual at the markets enjoying its sights and smells and bringing home fare that would later be sizzling and simmering over a flame, more time letting the sun rise high above the horizon before they rose, and more time giving in to the ever-present temptation of embracing one another, tasting one another, they could hardly be blamed. 

“Is it not unjust that you always wake so soon after me? You interrupt such important work,” Yusuf whispered one morning, as Nicolò guided his chin towards him with his fingers. In front of them a scattering of paraphernalia adorned the floor.

Nicolò glanced down and turned his lips away as Yusuf began leaning in. “This is important?” He teased, eyes roving over the arcs and lines of many sketches. 

Yusuf didn’t grace him with a response. Instead he pressed his kiss to Nicolò’s temple. They were both seated in the center of their small, shared space, enjoying the quiet of the early day and the coolness that tended linger for a time after the stars had faded from the sky. Nicolò had only just woken, and upon finding Yusuf leaning over his drawings had pulled the linens aside and moved over to join him. Never mind that most of the drawings were of him, that he knew he was drawing him as he slept.

Yusuf’s lips trailed down Nicolò’s skin as his eyes swept the assortment before him, his cheeks warming inevitably as he perused. He never failed to think that surely he wasn’t the person Yusuf captured him to be, that he wasn’t worthy of whatever emotion poured from these images. Still, he couldn’t find it in him to say so.

He became slightly distracted when the edge of a sketch tucked between several others caught his eye, an anomalous one with a background of jagged ridges that yielded to a landscape that looked familiar—the sparse brush of the coastal plains in their region. He carefully tugged it free to see it in full, and found that no figure dominated the drawing, as with the ones where he was present. Instead there were two shadowy, smudgy human forms in the center. He could tell the two people were not meant to be them by the weapons they held in their hands, oddly distinct despite the perspective —a bow and an axe. 

“They are getting closer.” Nicolò exhaled, his voice low and acknowledging.

Yusuf didn’t have to ask what he meant. He only murmured his agreement before angling himself so he could cover Nicolò’s lips with his own. 

“But it will still take them time, to find us,” Nicolò breathed when he got the chance. Neither of them knew what it meant, that they had been dreaming for years of these two women, who seemed to be much like them, but also much different. 

Yusuf grinned into their kiss, and Nicolò took the chance to run his tongue over his teeth as he did so. “Soon, though,” Yusuf managed, “they will.” There was something exciting for the both of them about looking forward to the day when they met others who shared their gift, their curse, whatever it may be. They wanted to learn what they might have to teach them about their destinies.

“Mm,” Nicolò devoted himself more fully to Yusuf’s mouth then, yet was still content to go at the pace the time of day seemed to set for them. He could hear the world waking up beyond their door, and was comforted by the sounds of foot traffic and of slow Arabic drifting leisurely from the street, the distant call of gulls somewhere above the town’s ports. Yusuf seemed caught up in the peace of it as well, and thus their kissing was relaxed and easy. It was a natural thing for Nicolò to twine their fingers together, and for Yusuf to pull them into his lap. 

Their morning carried on that way, with neither of them letting the other stray more than a hands’ length away. Yusuf returned briefly to his sketching while Nicolò observed him. Their sleeping arrangement was such that it was hardly a feat for them to move back over to the sheets and continue their morning in bed. To Nicolò’s amusement, Yusuf fell back asleep in the middle of a drawing, lulled by the lines of pressure Nicolò had been rubbing into the muscles of his arms, his shoulders.

His actions ceased when he realized Yusuf’s breathing had evened out, and Nicolò rearranged himself alongside him. 

Sometimes, on the occasions when Nicolò woke before Yusuf, and particularly when he woke before him on the mornings that followed a mission, he could not stymie the upwelling of gratitude he felt for the man beside him. It might’ve been more right for him to feel the grief or the regret which so often plagued him from his days fighting on the wrong side of a wrong war—they were feelings that even followed him into his dreams, after all, when he could practically watch as they bled in amidst the fragments of the women’s lives which were entangled with their own. In the past he had thought it wrong that when he looked at Yusuf as he slept he felt lucky. 

But the gratitude was inexorable. Nicolò was still in the midst of forgiving himself, knew he would continue to vie with those things in his past that were inextricably tied to his history.

Yet ultimately, the forces of grief and regret were ineffectual against Yusuf’s sleeping form: the lids of his eyes, the curls of his hair, the rise and fall of his chest. 

And so Nicolò’s gaze lingered upon him until he woke again, and then after. Yusuf turned towards him and peered back at him, his eyes searching. 

He seemed to find what he was looking for, because he seemed utterly placid when he eventually raised himself onto his elbows and forewent any words save one, an inquiry that held many promises, despite its simplicity:

“Breakfast?”

And Nicolò grinned, the day unfolding before him.


End file.
